You are now in the main content area
Luke Taylor

Luke Taylor

Assistant Professor
DepartmentLincoln Alexander School of Law
Areas of ExpertiseFamily law, employment law, legal history, law, gender and sexuality, feminist, queer, critical legal theory

Prior to his postgraduate studies, Luke Taylor worked as a commercial litigator in Australia, and served as legal research officer at the High Court of Australia. He has also taught courses on legal method and reasoning, legal history, and gender issues in the law at the University of Toronto, McGill University, and the University of New South Wales.

Taylor’s research traverses contemporary and historical dimensions of Canadian, English and Australian family law, employment law and criminal law, and the intersections of these fields with questions of gender and sexuality.

He is particularly interested in the development of the field of family law in different national contexts; the diffusion of legal ideas concerning the family and sexuality throughout the British Empire in the 19th century; and contemporary dimensions of the regulation of adult personal relationships. His work has appeared in, among others, the University of Toronto Law Journal, the McGill Law Journal, and Law & History Review.

Taylor holds an SJD and LLM from the University of Toronto, where he was a CGS Bombardier scholar and received the Marks Medal in 2018-19. In 2019-20, he was the Boulton Fellow at the Faculty of Law, McGill University. 

Books

"Constructing the Family: Marriage and Work in Nineteenth-Century English Law", University of Toronto Press (2022)

Papers in Peer-Reviewed Publications

“Exceptionalism in Canadian Domestic Contracts” (forthcoming) McGill Law Journal. 


“Marriage, Work, and the Invention of Family Law in English Legal Thought” (2020) 70:2 University of Toronto Law Journal, 137-176. 


“Speaking the Unspeakable: Buggery, Law, and Community Surveillance in Colonial New South Wales, 
1788-1838” (2020) Law & History Review. 


“Designated Inhospitality: The Treatment of Asylum Seekers Who Arrive by Boat in Canada and Australia”
(2015) 60:2 McGill Law Journal, 333-379. 


“The Trouble with Windsor” (2014) 23:4 Griffith Law Review, 519-544. 


“Getting Over It? The Future of Same-Sex Marriage in Australia” (2013) 27 Australian Journal of Family Law, 26-58. 


“Corporate Responsibility for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: Rights in Search of a Remedy?” (2009) 87 Journal of Business Ethics, 433 (with Justine Nolan). 


Conference and Workshop Presentations (Selected)

“Diffusion, Innovation, and Resistance: The Laws and Practices of Marriage and Divorce in Colonial Australia,” McGill Faculty of Law, Montreal, QC, March 2020.

“Constituting Family Law and Employment Law in Nineteenth-Century English Legal Thought,” Law & Society Annual Meeting, Toronto, ON, July 2018.

“Marriage, Work, and the Dissolution of the Productive Household,” The Sexual Contract: 30 Years On, Cardiff Law School, May 2018. 


“Speaking of Buggery in Colonial New South Wales,” Irish Conference of Historians, University College Cork, Ireland, April 2018. 


“Constituting Family and Employment in Nineteenth-Century English Legal Thought,” Law, Culture & the Humanities 
Annual Conference, Georgetown University Law Center, March 2018. 


“Technologies of Sexual Injustice,” Canadian Law & Society Association, Oshawa, ON, January 2018. 


“Marriage, Status, and the Making of English Family Law,” Yale Law School Doctoral Scholars Conference, November 
2017. 


Marks Medal, Best Thesis in the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, 2020. 


Boulton Fellowship, McGill University, 2019-20. 


Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarships, 2016-19. 


Hallam Prize for Best Performance in Sexual Diversity Studies, 2014. 


University of Toronto Faculty Scholarship for LLM, 2013-14. 


Degree Institution Year
SJD (Doctor of Juridical Science) University of Toronto 2019
LLM (Master of Laws) University of Toronto 2014
LLB/BA (Bachelor of Laws (Hons 1)/(Bachelor of Arts) University of New South Wales 2009